Possible GPL violation of Tandberg

Last November, the hacker Jason Garrett-Glaser, a leading developer of open source project x264, publishing information which states that one of the patent applications Tandberg Telecom since December 2008, contains a step-by-step an algorithm that was added to the x264 codebase two months, more specifically:

“an accurate description, step by step, the algorithm that I created for decimate_score functions (and then coeff_level_run) x264 in 2008, ” said Jason Garrett-Glaser.

The project x264 is under GPL license so it would be a violation of this license, for its part Tandberg claims that the algorithm discovered independently.

We must wait to confirm if this is another case of violation of the GPL, a priori shows the great debate over software patents, as it may be instances in which someone gets a patent for a code defined by an independent developer, and has the right to sue others for use, included those of the author. The question that comes to mind is how many software patents are a plagiarism free software?